Betsy Weis (Painting)

Since the time I looked out the window from my childhood home at a sliver of the Pacific Ocean in the distance, nature has been an essential influence on me. Seductive, wild and beautiful, yet simultaneously unpredictable and risky, nature has been the enduring subject of my work.

As a child, I tried to avoid any kind of nature experience. Walking in the woods was hellish. I liked the city: concrete and traffic were familiar and comforting. But at night, from the window near my bed, the fragment of ocean appearing in the distance lulled me to sleep. Eventually, I learned I liked something more about nature while studying the paintings of Titian, Giorgione and Friedrich. Their idealized renderings of dreamy landscapes made me think, I want to go there.In my paintings, I have refined an abstract language in which the luminous, textural, and plastic qualities of paint are used represent the natural world. Water and light are my primary references: depicted simultaneously from above and below, water reflects and absorbs the light which moves through the water’s layers of dark color into deep fluid space.At various times, my work has been referred to as a fairy tale, a mystery, or an unexplained landscape, something that feels familiar, like a memory. As I work, I am remembering nature, seeing what I remember. Or, to paraphrase 20th Century composer Morton Feldman, We do not see what we see...only what we remember.("We do not hear what we hear…only what we remember," Morton Feldman. From Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, Edited by B. H. Friedman, Exact Change, 2000)

Established in 1991, Carrie Haddad Gallery represents mid-career and emerging artists of the Hudson Valley and beyond working in painting, sculpture, mixed media and photography. We organize 7 group exhibits per year in a 3000 square foot gallery space on Hudson's Warren Street.